K: Just a general thumbs up these things need to be said imo, as part of a healthy broad spectrum society, but people like you who bring them up, will often be considered nutters by many . . . . . in a predominantly insane world, where 'insanity' has become legitimised and necessary, then idealistic humanitarian voices, like your own, are not listened to. They are feared.

We just keep taking the pills and leading lives of quiet despair.

Personally i can play both games, but sometimes I wonder for how long. It's tiring thinking your own renegade thoughts whilst keeping up appearances.

* * * * * *

C: I appreciate and understand what you are trying to achieve with your blog, however is

‘I am advocating that all bullies must be identified and publicly named and shamed. They must be publicly humiliated and disgraced and ejected from public service in show trials to set an example and act as a deterrent.’

really a productive way to deal with the situation? Humiliating the bully in public is no better than the bullying itself. Surely we want to be better than the bully?

and

‘Anyone who endorses bullying, or acquiesces to it, or is complacent about it, is also unfit for teaching or any other public service. To claim that this disgraceful behaviour is 'called life' is unforgivable in a teacher. Shame on you. Depression and bills are no excuse for kowtowing to evil. Make no mistake, bullying is evil. Or do you wish to defend it as 'part of life'?’

is pretty much the sort of thing I'd expect a bully to say. You are saying someone is somehow inferior simply because they hold a different opinion to yourself. You are trying to shame them into thinking the same as you and lower their self esteem into the bargain. These are exactly the sort of things a bully does in order to get what they want.

I strongly advise you to rethink your approach to your campaign. I too see the effects of management pushing too much work onto staff and would like to see a better system whereby these stresses did not impact on the health of workers, but I'd prefer to do it in a manner that did not introduce new stresses such as guilt and fear of being called unfit for teaching simply because I wish to use a different approach.

As such, I will not take part in your survey, nor your campaign.

Thanks for reading.

* * * * * *

K: ‘As such, I will not take part in your survey, nor your campaign.’

No, neither will I. But I do value free speech, even if I don't agree wholehearteldy with another person's stance. I do appreciate thought provoking ideas/opinions. I hope i made that clear in my previous post. If they are too extreme (for me) or personally emotionally driven, I lose interest. Some people on the other hand, may become more interested by this.

* * * * * *

Me: ‘Education is the emptying a bucket over the lighting of a fire’. (Not William Butler Yeats).

I’m sorry for the delay in reply. As a consequence of prolonged bullying, after 10 years teaching I am about to become homeless. It’s been preoccupying my mind, as it must preoccupy the minds of those still fortunate enough to be fearful for their jobs.

“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” (Popular 20th century saying, paraphrasing Edmund Burke [1770] and often misattributed to him)

“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” (Edmund Burke, Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents, 1770).

The rapacity of evil men, and the folly of appeasing them, was revealed to the world in 1938. That was 73 years ago. The lesson is clear. If evil is unchallenged, it is encouraged.

With specific regard to education, I am personally aware (as, I suspect, are you) of headteachers and senior management who have felt free to engage in the following activities:

Personal and systemic bullying (‘reigns of terror’)

Nepotism

Sexual intimidation, sexual assault and abuse of power

Knowingly appointing and promoting sexual abusers

Racism

Exam cheating

Large scale fraud and embezzlement

Please refer to the broadly representative examples below for case studies in the public domain:

These cases are mere public protrusions. There are vast icebergs of corruption beneath the headlines. The fate of lookouts and whistleblowers is well known (but not spoken of). They are drowned in sacks by moonlight…

The recent News of the World scandal is a microcosm of our education system. Schools have sacrificed truth for sales figures, integrity for boardroom intrigue. Corporate misgovernance, systemic corruption, sickening hypocrisy, the callous destruction of human beings for personal profit - all of these News of the World shenanigans are everyday events in the British education system.

I stand by my comments. In fact, I go further. Bullies, and their allies, and their apologists, must be purged from the system by all means necessary. Education is more than a ‘safe job’ (actually, it’s nothing of the sort). Education is the survival of our nation. If teachers and management don’t have the stomach for the fight against corruption, then they may be part of the problem and perhaps need to quit the field. To borrow from ‘Bomber’ Harris:

“The management started this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bully everyone else, and nobody was going to fight back. At News of the World, Southside Business College, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” ~ Marty ‘B*stard’ Gull

“We are going to scourge corrupt management from end to end. We are purging institutions scandal by scandal and ever more terribly in order to make it impossible for idiots to go on running them. That is our object, and we shall pursue it relentlessly.” ~ Marty ‘B*stard’ Gull

“I do not personally regard the whole of the remaining management of Britain as worth the bones of one decent teacher.” ~ Marty ‘B*stard’ Gull

Teachers, has your Board of Governors put you at the mercy of a psychopath? In a 2005 study at Surrey University (http://works.bepress.com/katar​ina_fritzon/1/), 3 out of 11 personality disorders were found to be more common in senior management than in deeply disturbed criminal psychiatric patients. The study described such management types as successful psychopaths and the criminals as unsuccessful psychopaths…

This was a 2005 study conducted by Belinda Board and Katarina Fritzon, psychologists at Surrey University. They interviewed senior management personnel and gave them profile tests designed to identify various personality disorders. The results were then compared with those of criminal psychiatric patients at Broadmoor Hospital. As stated, 3 out of 11 personality disorders were more prevalent in senior management than in deeply disturbed criminals.

The 3 most common personality disorders identified in senior management were:

Do any of these ring a bell? If so, your Board of Governors may have put you at the mercy of a psychopath. Psychopaths have no mercy whatsoever. They will happily bully you to death and thoroughly enjoy the experience of power.

Yeats claimed that ‘education is not the filling of a bucket but the lighting of a fire’. Unfortunately he was wrong. As Hume demonstrated, you can’t derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.

Education nowadays is all about standardization. Yeats would take one look at our schools and rewrite ‘education is the emptying a bucket over the lighting of a fire’. Standardization is indoctrination by the back door.

Big business and tiny minds now contradict the laws of wisdom. The more disastrous their ideas are proved to be, the more they are promoted as the future of education.

It’s as though terrorists prefaced each atrocity with a PR statement claiming that it was regrettable but necessary ‘progress’.

“Ah, progress. Why didn’t you say so before? That’s alright then. Nobody can stand in the way of progress…

What’s that? Define progress? Don’t be stupid. That’s philosophy. We fired all the philosophy faculty last month. Who needs to think when the answers are in the company brochure? That’s progress for you...”

In the UK, the establishment has now completed its transformation of schools into corporate indoctrination camps. It is impossible for free thinkers to exist in the UK education system.

An American friend recently elaborated on his definition of indoctrination. I thought it seemed a fairly accurate description of schools in the UK...

1. It is a set of unprovable principles.

2. Such principles are often instilled at such an age that the individual has not yet developed the cognitive abilities to recognize them as false. This means that they are instilled as not to be questioned.

3. But when they are questioned it is met with slanted answers or outright false claims.

4. There is almost always an underlying hidden self-serving agenda by those in the ranks (elected leaders, elite in society, administrators, etc.) for requiring such a doctrine to be instilled.

5. It almost always (such as with religion or patriotism) demands your blind, unquestioned loyalty or at the very least that you remain obedient to this set of principles.

I repeat, such disastrous indoctrination, and such shameless parasites feeding off the public purse, need to be publicly ridiculed and humiliated and driven out of office. Ridicule won’t do the job on its own. But, to destroy the ‘reign of terror’, it’s a good start…

“ … Schools are now heavily promoting the entertainments industry in the arts curriculum. This is inherently right-wing because it tends to favour an uncritical approach to ‘traditional’ values. Tapping into the current vogue for light entertainment and humiliation contests, schools are disastrously misappropriating an X-Factor/Apprentice approach to give them a spurious ‘relevance’. Most students are now taught a love of fame and money over love of the art form. Many develop inflated egos and delusions of grandeur.

The entertainments industry has one of the highest unemployment rates of any profession. It is also notoriously brutal and corrupt with a glut of wasted talent. To exploit naïve young dreams for school publicity, then cynically throw them into shark-infested waters is morally disgusting and nothing to do with education.

Even more sinister is the creep of religious fundamentalism under the guise of faith schools and traditional values. As the ‘good harmless fun’ of entertainment is whipped up to hysterical levels, analytical subjects such as Film Studies are being quietly pushed out. I can’t tell you the devious games that management play to ‘prove’ that there isn’t a demand for these subjects. Having spoken off the record to students, there IS a demand. But this is diverted through sneaky ploys when students are given ‘advice’ on their subject choices.

The underlying reason for these sneaky power games is political. Right-wing, narrow-minded traditionalists have infiltrated senior management, boards of governors, and local councils. They secretly view the intellectual side of the arts as politically biased and dangerously subversive. This may have been true in the 1970s and 1980s as the Marxists fought their last battles in the system, but it’s a damnable lie now. The arts are the epitome of even-handed analysis and criticism. It’s the right-wing who are the new dangerous subversives, hijacking the education system for political indoctrination…”

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About Me

I am a fully qualified teacher of Drama, Media and Film Studies with ten years’ work experience in secondary and further education. I graduated from the Central School of Speech and Drama (one of the most respected Drama conservatoires in the world) with a first class Honours degree in Drama and Education and a PGCE.
I was a writer-in-residence and workshop leader for a Southend-based youth theatre for ten years, during which time I developed my creative writing skills to include playscripts, poetry and songs. With my deep interest in Film, I have now expanded these skills to include screenplays.
I now wish to take a sabbatical from teaching to focus on a proposal for a PhD thesis. This will involve developing new collaborative methodologies for intertextual musical theatre in the context of a resynthesis of art, philosophy and science.
My specific areas of interest and expertise are as follows: Academic, Acting, Analysis, Assessment, Auditions, Collaboration, Creative Thinking, Directing, Drama, Education, English, Film, History, Lecturing, Literature, Media, Poetry, Philosophy, Playscripts, Screenplays, Songs, Teaching, Television, Theatre, Tutoring, Workshops, Writing.

I’m writing a first draft for a musical. It's called Marty Gull (Marty[r] Gull[ible]). It's a surreal, satirical, tragicomic piece of musical political theatre: a cautionary tale of school politics, backstabbing egos and the state of the nation.

I’ve written the first draft libretto using a medley of melodies in my head from well-known musicals.

I would like to extend an open invitation to all budding musicians and composers to submit their own musical interpretations. I would also welcome interest from actors (age 20-25) who can sing and dance.

The plan is to develop a new collaborative form of musical theatre. Once we get a good working team of lyricists, composers, musicians, actors and designers together we can decide on the final evolution of the piece and arrange copyright accordingly. I would like to submit or even take the piece to Central as a work-in-progress.

Ultimately, I would be interested in using all of this as a springboard for a thesis on new art forms and musical theatre. But, most of all, I would love to have the opportunity of working with kind, creative and talented people.

If you like the sound of any of this, please post a comment at http://martygull.blogspot.com/or get in touch with me through one of the following methods: